


koʻele wāwae

by Siria



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Backstory, Community: picfor1000, Family, Gen, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-15
Updated: 2011-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-14 19:10:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kono, standing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	koʻele wāwae

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the picfor1000 challenge, based on [this picture](http://www.flickr.com/photos/42079290@N08/4440228315/). With thanks to Cate for betaing!

The thing Kono remembered most clearly about that day was the moment in between—just after she’d lost her footing on the board, just before the wave surged up to meet her. It couldn’t have lasted more than a second or two, but the memory had such sharp edges that she could remember with absolute clarity the disorientation that went with not being able to tell which blue was sea and which was sky, the bite of salt at the back of her throat, the strangely calm certainty that this was going to be bad. It wasn’t the strongest memory of the accident that she had—the crack and snap of her knee echoed through her remembrance of that day and of all the long months after it—but it was the most distinct. It was like a movie running in her head, frame by frame: her purchase slipping, the board falling away beneath her, the cloudless sky.

Ian paid for the best surgeons money could buy, the most advanced physical therapy, and it was weeks of torment just to get to the point where Kono could put both feet flat on the ground and not break out into a sweat from the pain of it. There were days when the frustration was overwhelming, because she was eighteen and she knew she’d lost the future she thought she wanted more than anything else; because she was eighteen and her body no longer did what she wanted it to do.

Chin Ho came to see her at the rehab facility about as often as her parents did, though Kono preferred his visits by far—her dad fussed over her, her mom got cranky with the staff. Chin sat with her, accepted her setbacks with the same quiet equanimity that he greeted her progress, didn’t ask her questions about what she wanted to do now. On her bad days, Kono got cranky with him just for that—threw a pillow at him on the day the doctor told her there was a possibility she’d need a second round of surgery, and Chin hadn’t seemed as upset at that as Kono had felt he should be. Hadn’t seemed as angry.

“No call for that, cuz,” he told her mildly, picking up the pillow from the ground and putting it back on the bed. His fingers brushed briefly over the back of her hand before he sat down again; the look in his eyes was very kind.

Kono plucked at a stray thread in the blanket, anger transmuted all at once into a hot rush of embarrassment. “Sorry,” she muttered, not knowing why simple understanding was able to get to her in a way that her dad’s fretting, her mom’s low-banked anger, and all of Ian’s lavish indulgence couldn’t.

“No pilikia,” Chin said. “I just want you to get back on your feet, okay?”

“Yeah,” Kono said, mouth quirking.

“Honest?”

“ _Yeah_ ,” Kono said, grinning and rolling her eyes and feeling inexplicably better. “Who needs a big brother to pester them when they have you?”

“I’m very persistent,” Chin agreed, and stooped to kiss her on the forehead before he left for work.

Kono learned to walk again, to run, to ride a bike and climb steps with ease. She learned to live with the ache that started to pulse through the bone in the hours before every thunderstorm, to dry swallow a handful of ibuprofen and keep on going. One morning, she set her jaw and surfed again—spent an hour out on the waves at Waikīkī, made herself keep going until the salt on her cheeks was more from the ocean spray than from her tears, schooled herself until her stance on the board was just as steady as before.

The doctors had told her that the joint would never again be strong enough to let her surf professionally—that her knee didn’t have the resilience anymore to take the brunt of the waves, the ocean’s pitch and pull. The click in her knee when she popped up on the board meant Kono had to admit they were right. But she also knew that she was able to stand tall on land now in a way that she hadn’t before the accident—that the long, lonely year of sweating and cursing her way through physical therapy and homework, SATs and surgery, had let her find her footing.

She was in her last year of college when things went down with Chin. Kono’s grandmother all but took to her bed from the shame; her uncles set their jaws and turned their backs; her parents flat out forbade Kono from associating with him. Kono found Chin down on a stretch of beach near Diamond Head, standing with his hands in his pockets and watching the sunset.

“Hey, cuz,” she said, gently bumping her elbow against his by way of greeting.

“Hey, Kono,” Chin said, and Kono didn’t think she’d ever seen his face set in lines of such sadness before. He looked like a different person—not quite the cousin she’d been looking up to since she was small.

“You didn’t do it, right?”

Chin raised an eyebrow at her.

“Exactly,” Kono said. “So there’s no need for you to look at me like that.”

He sighed. “You shouldn’t be here. Your parents—”

“No pilikia,” Kono answered him, remembering what he’d told her when she thought things couldn’t get much worse. “I just want you to get back on your feet, okay?”

“Yeah?” he said, mouth quirking up as if he remembered too.

“Yeah,” Kono said, because she knew her cousin—knew there was no chance he’d take a false step like that, not when he walked so upright through the world. Not when he’d been the one to encourage her to stand when she’d thought she couldn’t do it on her own anymore. “Yeah,” she said, making her choice, planting her feet firm in the sand beside him, “I can be pretty persistent.”


End file.
